We
are working together with greater initiative and enthusiasm to
serve our fellows in lasting ways, recognizing that we thus serve
and honor our Father in heaven.

Faith
is the foundation of our spiritual lives, but service to others
is its expression. Through Gods leading, every day can open
hearts, inspire minds, and leave others better by our presence.

For
whom should we live, if not for others? Is lifes purpose
but to lay up redundant treasures for profligate heirs to squander?
Only what we do for others lasts, the rest is dust and ashes,
temples to be ravaged by looters or buried in desert sand. The
bridge we buildfor what purpose if no one crosses? Our only
lasting possessions, our treasures in heaven, are those things
we do for others.

We
can only truly serve by love, for without love our gestures are
empty, paisley rags cast by the stream side. To find our service
we must ask the Father to show us our part in his plans, for he
has designed each of us to fulfill a particular work that he may
disclose in an intuition of deep calling or perhaps in the unfolding
of opportunities. Until opened, the door to our service may look
like many others, but the Fathers hand will guide us to
that which we may make our own and to that which can become our
destiny.

Service
is faiths expression, and faith is services fuel.
The stronger our faith, the greater our desire to carry out this
service in effective and lasting ways.

One
of the most important lessons to be learned during your mortal
career is teamwork. . . . Few are the duties in the universe
for the lone servant. The higher you ascend, the more lonely you
become when temporarily without the association of your fellows.
28:5.14

Service--purposeful
service, not slavery--is productive of the highest satisfaction
and is expressive of the divinest dignity. Service--more service,
increased service, difficult service, adventurous service, and at
last divine and perfect service--is the goal of time and the destination
of space. But ever will the play cycles of time alternate with the
service cycles of progress. 28:6.17

When
the spiritual tests of greatness are applied, the moral elements
are not disregarded, but the quality of unselfishness revealed in
disinterested labor for the welfare of one's earthly fellows, particularly
worthy beings in need and in distress, that is the real measure
of planetary greatness. 28:6.20

You
will learn that you increase your burdens and decrease the likelihood
of success by taking yourself too seriously. Nothing can take precedence
over the work of your status sphere--this world or the next. Very
important is the work of preparation for the next higher sphere,
but nothing equals the importance of the work of the world in which
you are actually living. But though the work is important,
the self is not. When you feel important, you lose energy
to the wear and tear of ego dignity so that there is little energy
left to do the work. Self-importance, not work-importance, exhausts
immature creatures; it is the self element that exhausts, not the
effort to achieve. You can do important work if you do not become
self-important; you can do several things as easily as one if you
leave yourself out. 48:6.26

And
when a human being does find God, there is experienced within
the soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of triumph
in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving service-contact
with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that he has found
God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal
goodness within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows.
Real religion leads to increased social service. 102:3.4

"Always
remember that God does not reward man for what he does but for
what he is; therefore should you extend help to your fellows without
the thought of rewards. Do good without thought of benefit to the
self." 131:8.5

When
Jesus heard this, he said: "Be willing, then, to take up your
responsibilities and follow me. Do your good deeds in secret; when
you give alms, let not the left hand know what the right hand does."
140:6.11

The
Master fully realized that certain social results would appear
in the world as a consequence of the spread of the gospel of the
kingdom; but he intended that all such desirable social manifestations
should appear as unconscious and inevitable outgrowths, or natural
fruits, of this inner personal experience of individual believers,
this purely spiritual fellowship and communion with the divine spirit
which indwells and activates all such believers. 170:5.12

"To
every one who has, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance;
but from him who has not, even that which he has shall be taken
away. You cannot stand still in the affairs of the eternal kingdom.
My Father requires all his children to grow in grace and in a knowledge
of the truth. You who know these truths must yield the increase
of the fruits of the spirit and manifest a growing devotion to the
unselfish service of your fellow servants. And remember that, inasmuch
as you minister to one of the least of my brethren, you have done
this service to me." 176:3.5

Jesus
taught that service to one's fellows is the highest concept
of the brotherhood of spirit believers. Salvation should be taken
for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer's
chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation
but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one's
fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men. 188:4.9

In
winning souls for the Master, it is not the first mile of compulsion,
duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather
the second mile of free service and liberty-loving devotion
that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother
in love and sweep him on under spiritual guidance toward the higher
and divine goal of mortal existence. Christianity even now willingly
goes the first mile, but mankind languishes and stumbles
along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second-milers--so
few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he
taught his disciples to live and love and serve.

The
call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society
by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus' brotherhood of the kingdom
should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred
since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions
in the flesh. 195:10.5&6